Contents

Acknowledgments

First off, I wish to give heartfelt thanks to the
colleagues who read chapters of this work in various stages and
generously offered invaluable commentary and feedback. The rigorous
critiques and encouraging advice of the following individuals were
especially key: Mark Sandberg (a wise and inspiring mentor), Carol J.
Clover, Linda ...

Introduction

This book is an exploration of how Scandinavian
whiteness and ethnicity functioned in Hollywood cinema during
the period roughly between the two World Wars. The field of ethnic
studies has generally tended to overlook Scandinavians in America
as a category worthy of study, assuming it to be comparatively unproblematic,
if not invisible. Scandinavian immigrants were presumably so ...

1. Racializing Vinland - The Nordic Conquest of Whiteness in Technicolor’s The Viking

“And the first white man set foot on the shores
of the New World.” This intertitle appears at the climactic
moment of the 1928 feature film The Viking, independently
produced by the Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation and distributed
by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The “first white man” in America here ...

While the viking appropriated the vinland sagas
to shore up biological and essentialist concepts of Nordic
whiteness in the “discovery” of America, other silent-era
films in 1920s Hollywood cinema engage more directly with Scandinavian
whiteness. As this chapter argues, He Who Gets Slapped self-consciously
allegorizes and “makes strange” Scandinavian racial and ...

3. Hotel Imperial - The Border Crossings of Mauritz Stiller

One crisis of the American film industry’s
talkie revolution pitted the fantasmatic, mute bodies and
faces of Scandinavian émigré actors against the foreign-accented
aurality of their recorded voices. Hollywood’s steady conversion
to sound between 1927 and 1931 ended the antediluvian period
when Scandinavian performers could remain unmarked as foreign others
on the American screen. ...

Charlie Chan is Swedish. A priori, the equivalence
of those two terms might at first strike the reader as slightly oxymoronic.
How might such an equation be tenable? Chapter two
explored the possibility that even Scandinavians might have had to
“become white” in America. The present chapter places further pressure
on generally received notions of Nordic (racial, physiognomic) and ...

6. Two-Faced Women - Hollywood’s and Third Reich Cinema’s War for the Nordic Female Star

Between 1933 and 1945 Hollywood and Nazi cinema
competed for the imported Nordic female star within their
rival and ultimately enemy film cultures. Scandinavian ethnicity,
which we have seen as being extraordinarily malleable and plastic,
now returns carrying surprisingly essentialist aspects of Nordic naturalness
and “givenness.” While the adaptability of Scandinavian ethnicity ...

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